Watching Steve Jobs, the new movie about the controversial but influential co-founder of Apple, you can't help but be awed at seeing just how far one man will go to impose himself on history.

At each and every crucial point during its two-hour running time, you are in the simultaneously detestable and irresistible presence of someone who's not only capable of bending each and every characteristic of reality to his will, but also wants you to see firsthand exactly the all-consuming power he wields.

Oh, sorry, did you think I was talking about Steve Jobs? Sorry, I was actually referring to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

Steve Jobs finds Sorkin working in the intricate and literate mode that's characterized most of his acclaimed works for screens large and small, with hypercharged pacing, whip-cracking verbal bon mots and ripostes littering the landscape like shrapnel, and an unshakable focus on a singular ideological perspective.

What works in one genre does not automatically work in all others, however, and this adventurous but unsatisfying film falters because Sorkin's crisply pressed, tightly tracked approach leaves neither it nor its irascible protagonist the room they so desperately need to breathe.

Sorkin has employed a no-nonsense, highly theatrical three-act framework that leaves little to chance and less to the imagination. We first meet Jobs (Michael Fassbender) in January 1984, impatiently waiting backstage in Cupertino to publicly present the first Macintosh computer to a world that had no idea what it was in for. (The now-classic Super Bowl ad had already aired, but who at that point could divine what it meant?) Too bad the 128KB version of the computer Jobs had planned to display is no longer saying "Hello" as it had been in all the lead-up tests—if it can't execute that necessary action, Jobs reasons, the entire event might as well be canceled.

There's no shortage of scenes of Jobs strong-arming his team to get it working, of course, but of far more interest to Sorkin are the struggles Jobs is ignoring in order to change technology forever. Foremost among these involves his ex-girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who's come asking for money, and the 5-year-old daughter named Lisa (Mackenzie Moss) Jobs is unwilling to acknowledge is his.

But there's also, naturally, Apple's co-founder and Jobs's longtime friend, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), who's begging for keynote recognition for the Apple II team that Jobs does not want to provide. And Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), who, just before show time, asks Jobs probing questions about his life as an adoptee and how that's informed his my-way-or-the-highway worldview. Keeping all of this under control (more or less) and Jobs happy (more or less) is Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), the head of Mac marketing, who is Jobs's always-on-target right-hand woman.

Director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire,Trainspotting) keeps all this undeniably exciting, bringing to vibrant life the exhilarating but disjointed impact a severe case of pre-show jitters can have on the human psyche. And Sorkin's masterfully clipped, lethally sharp dialogue, as scripted and spoken, pulses with the vitality and intelligence that for more than two decades have characterized this writer at his very best.

Unfortunately, the searing energy of this mix of material and presentation begins flagging just after Jobs steps out to deliver his speech, and we're suddenly transported ahead in time. It's now 1988 and Jobs is just minutes from unveiling the first computer from NeXT, the company he founded after he was forced out of Apple in 1985. Though the specifics vary slightly, the sweep is identical, and Jobs can't take this step of his journey until after he once again confronts Chrisann, Lisa (now 9 years old and played by Ripley Sobo), Wozniak, and Sculley (who, responsible for Jobs's ouster, is not his favorite person), while under Hoffman's hawk-like supervision. And just before we meet the NeXT, we're again ushered forward, this time a full decade, to the point after Jobs has returned to Apple and is preparing to reveal the game-changing, candy-colored iMac, but must run through the entire standard procedure one last time.

If Sorkin efficiently encapsulates Jobs's career in this way, he and Boyle are such slaves to the repetitive structure that it soon becomes oppressive rather than innovative. The breathless fluidity that guides us through the launches gives all three a flat, identical feeling that doesn't underscore the critical importance each had on Jobs or on computers. Similarly, there's no modulation in the tension present in the various relationships, so each fight with Chrisann is passive-aggressive, each argument with Wozniak a pseudo-epic clash of incompatible wills, each encounter with Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine plays the 19-year-old version) reinforces the same aspect of Jobs's indifference, and so on. The few minor digressions from the form—Jobs must have it out with software wizard Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) at one point, and with GQ reporter Joel Pforzheimer (John Ortiz) at another—are, at best, forgettable detours.

You may get a kinetic rush from the execution, but aside from that, Steve Jobs is not a memorable film. Part of it is the restrictive concept, which leaves Sorkin little room to convey the true drama of Jobs. Fassbender catapults himself into the role, and invests it with an appealing strength, but little of the waspish vulnerability that was also an integral (and likely unintentional) part of Jobs's public persona. As a result, Fassbender is statuesque—even better, Sorkinesque, but more hyperreal than really real: too good to be true. And you know what they say about things like that.

This is a frequent modus operandi of Sorkin (Fassbender's Jobs is not that far removed from Josiah Bartlett, the president on Sorkin's TV series The West Wing), but it pays limited dividends. Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson's description of the Mac launch and the lead-up to it is gripping, presenting Jobs as a gifted artist in managing human psychology who is well aware of all the persuasive tools in his arsenal, and showing how even he was moved by the Macintosh's thunderous debut.

But Sorkin reduces him to a single-minded megalomaniac who has to learn over the course of the movie's 14 years to become human. No, Jobs succeeded because he was human, and understood what was needed to get what he wanted, even if others didn't agree or couldn't comprehend his vision.

Some may also take issue with the depiction of Jobs's NeXT exploits: It's suggested, in no uncertain terms, that he pursued the computer expressly for the purpose of getting back in at Apple, which, in the movie's context, makes him dangerously deceitful and calculatedly callous—not someone worthy of our appreciation.

Tech lovers may also find themselves frustrated because Sorkin doesn't delve into under-the-hood events and intrigue. A general weakness of technical detail obscures the precise scope of Jobs's accomplishments (however you categorize them), which could provide a bitter dose of calming irony. Perhaps an even bigger loss is felt with respect to Wozniak. Rogen's turn has a twist of his usual comic work, yes, but is most impressive in its warm understatement. His fine, sympathetic depiction of a left-behind brother is wasted on a role that, much like Wozniak's beloved Apple II products (he pushes Jobs to acknowledge their developers—who also spearheaded the ill-fated Newton—in the final chapter, set five years after the final model was produced), plays against Jobs himself as an unwanted appendage. The Jobs-Wozniak relationship, and its long-lasting, wide-ranging fallout, is robust enough to sustain a movie all on its own, but Sorkin's treatment of it minimizes its importance. (And though we're told that Jobs is and always will be fraternally protective of Wozniak, we never see on screen why that is.)

Despite some ham-handed capitulations to Jobs's past—in perhaps the most credibility-stretching chunk of the movie, Jobs's 1998 meeting with Sculley, the two visit the restaurant owned by Jobs's birth father—we learn little about the man beyond the single dimension the product launches elicit from him. And that makes his final development, into (spoiler alert) the man everyone else thinks he should be, disappointing. Are we watching the intentional destruction of genius? Or the natural evolution of it? There's no hint. We don't know, we don't care, and, in any event, it doesn't matter.

Shouldn't it? Jobs's unique contribution to the world was transforming personal computing into something completely personal, and then pushing his revamped conception of it into the mainstream. Through brute force and a gift for manipulating people right to the extent of their talent (and in some cases beyond), he reshaped an entire industry—and, by extension, a world becoming increasingly dependent on it—in his own idiosyncratic, perhaps even maddening, image. It's a fascinating, terrifying, and essentially unmatched achievement, and not one that even those of us who were alive and computing back in the 1980s could have predicted would shake out just as it did.

Related

Much the same was true of the rise of Facebook, but Sorkin's 2010 movie about that, The Social Network, more successfully probed the psychology and quiet pain of Mark Zuckerberg than Steve Jobs does (even though it took at least as many liberties with the facts). And, for all his missed opportunities, Sorkin has turned out a more compelling final product than either the 1999 TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley (which was primarily about Jobs' rivalry with Bill Gates), or the 2013 Ashton Kutcher–starring Jobs.

Even so, the man who made himself a legend and his company a household name forever comes in a distant second here—though not the way he tells it. While exploring the San Francisco Opera House's orchestra pit with Wozniak just before the NeXT launch, Jobs diagnoses, with crystalline acuity, his perception of himself. In comparison to the master musicians who play in the orchestra—such as Wozniak—Jobs says, "I play the orchestra." That tune would likely come through more clearly and more affectingly had Sorkin chosen to do a bit less playing.

About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

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